One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.

But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it.

It is, of course, perfectly reasonable that her campaign would never admit that publicly; all campaigns tell you that they are going to win! But, I have to ask: where were the credentialed media, where were the organization which purport to be journalistic rather than journolistic, when it comes to investigating claims that the campaign knew they were behind? Surely someone, even among those media sources which supported the Vice President, especially when they were all embarrassed that they were part of the cover-up of President Joe Biden’s gradual descent into dementia, should have asked if there was anything to the claims that the campaign were behind?

Kamala Harris Campaign Aides Suggest Campaign Was Just Doomed

The Harris campaign’s internal polling apparently never had her ahead of Trump.

by Arthur Delaney | Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Senior advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign suggested this week that there just wasn’t much else Harris could have done to beat Donald Trump.

Harris couldn’t have distanced herself from President Joe Biden, they said, because she was loyal. She couldn’t have responded more forcefully to attacks over trans rights, because doing so would have been playing Trump’s game.

And she might not have had much chance of winning anyway, given the deficit she inherited from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.

So, we have excuse number one. Yet we were told that her campaign was one of “joy,” which would sweep over America.

“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, OK, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Tuesday on the “Pod Save America” podcast in a joint interview with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter.

And now we come to the money lines:

Plouffe said the campaign’s internal polling never had Harris ahead of Trump.

“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

The credentialed media certainly trumpeted the pre-election poll which showed Mrs Emhoff with a three percentage point lead over Mr Trump in Iowa, due to a surge in support for the distaff candidate among women.

The former, and now future, President carried Iowa 927,531 (56.0%) to 707,290 (42.7%), a landslide margin, and greater than his margins in 2020 (53.1% to 44.9%) and 2016 (51.2% to 41.7%).

How did a poll with a purported ±3.4% margin of error miss the actual result by twelve percentage points? And why weren’t the credentialed media looking at a poll result which was such an outlier in a state which had been regarded as safely Republican?

I have said it previously: the credentialed media rarely tell outright lies, but their biases become obvious in their editorial choices over what news they cover, and what they ignore. And the credentialed media in our country very much ignored that there were any red flags in the Democrats’ campaign.